Jacob I Loved, But Esau I Hated

So this morning is the last sermon in the sermon series on godly parenting. And the topic, as I've been looking toward it, has been a difficult one for me to look forward to, or to look ahead to. The title of the sermon is, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated. And so our subject this morning is the reality that not all of Israel is truly Israel. meaning that not all children of believing parents become believers themselves. Even though they both grew up in the same homes with the same parents, living the same life, the children can end up in different places, some receiving Christ by faith and some rejecting him in their rebellion. So far in this sermon series, we've talked a lot about what we as parents ought to do, our responsibility to love our children, to train them, to discipline them, to nurture them. And all of that is...

absolutely true and necessary and good. And yet those things don't in and of themselves guarantee the outcome that we want. And that's a very difficult reality to face. Because what we want to know, if we're going to give our lives for something and our hearts to something and our love to something, we want to know that it's going to turn out the way we would like it to turn out. If you were going to spend your whole life investing in something, saying, this is what I want the fruit of all of my life to be, it's very difficult to face the reality that that may not be how it happens. It may not be when all the cards have been dealt how it shakes out. And so it's a reality of the idea of what happens to Christians' children. Do they all become believers?

There's something I don't think we talk much about, something we don't like to think about. I certainly don't. And what I want this morning, as we study this reality, is I want us to look it squarely in the face. I don't want us ignoring it. I want us to look it squarely in the face, and I want us to learn how to process this reality in our life. Because there are a number of ways we can negotiate or process or negate and get rid of this difficulty. And I don't want us to do that. I want us to grow and to see God for who he is and how he works. And I want us to grow in our love for him because that's what we want from our children. We want them to live a life of faith. We want them to live a life of joy and joyful obedience and service to our Lord Jesus Christ. And we have to model that for them, not just in the easy things.

but in the difficult things. And this is a difficult thing. This is ground zero difficult for a mother and a father. So would you please stand for the reading of God's Word from Romans chapter 9, verses 10 through 16. The Apostle Paul writes, And not only this, but there was Rebekah also, when she had conceived twins by one man, her father Isaac. For though the twins were not yet born, and had not done anything good or bad, So that God's purpose, according to his choice, would stand, not because of works, but because of him who calls. It was said to her, the older will serve the younger. Just as it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated. What shall we say then? There's no injustice with God, is there? May it never be. For he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.

So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. I want to begin our study of this text this morning with a comparison of Jacob and Esau. The men, what were they like? What kind of children were they? What kind of men were they? And I want to do this because I want to expose how we think about God's dealings with men. God doesn't choose the ones that we would choose. From God choosing Abraham, to choosing the nation of Israel, all the way through to Jesus choosing prostitutes and tax collectors and the thief on the cross, to be his companions, to be his brothers, to be his family. We see that God doesn't deal with the race of man the way that we would. So who were Jacob and Esau? If we're to describe them, what were they like? We know first from our text this morning, as well as from Genesis 25, that they were twins, that they were born together.

They were twins. It's pretty self-explanatory. We know that Isaac was old when he had them. He was 60 years old. And so their brothers are very close. They're twins. What else do we know about them? Well, just a few verses later, we read in Genesis 25-27 that when the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the field. But Jacob was a peaceful man, living in tents. And you see there's even... This early on, there's a description of them, and we're forming an opinion about who these men are. And so if you're the kind of guy that likes to hunt and likes outdoorsy things and likes to get dirt under your fingernails, you're saying, yeah, Esau. And if you're not that kind of guy, you're thinking, I'm a peaceful man. I stay intense. I work with my mind. And we like Jacob. And we're starting from the very beginning to form an opinion about who these men are and what they're like.

And really what I want you to see is you're thinking about more than just whether you identify with them. You're thinking, you know how the story ends. You know that Jacob was chosen and loved and Esau was hated. And you're trying to formulate how or why. And so when I read that Esau was red and he was hairy and he was a hunter and a man of the field, I think, I'm like Esau. I like Esau. Peaceful. man of the tent, you know, Jacob's cooking stew for his brothers. And, you know, I think that I'm more like Esau. I like Esau. I know I'm not supposed to like Esau because, you know, he doesn't get chosen, but we're starting to form these opinions. So Esau was a hunter and Jacob was civilized. We read in the next verse, Genesis 25, 28. Now Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for gain, but Rebekah loved Jacob.

And now it's not just the children that we're comparing, it's the parents. The parents have favorites. Isaac likes the one who, the hunter-gatherer. He likes Esau, loves him. But Rebecca loves Jacob. And I want you to think for a minute, is this the sort of thing you would want recorded about your family? You don't want this recorded about your family. You don't want people knowing that you have a favorite. We wouldn't say favorite. And we wouldn't say, well, I love this one and my wife loves the other one. We say things like, well, I get along with this one better. We connect. I understand him better. But our wives get upset if we talk that way. But this is the reality. Not just of parents, but of all men. We all are picking people we prefer, we like, we identify with, that we love. And we want things to go well for them. So Isaac loved Esau, but Rebekah loved Jacob. We also know that Jacob was crafty.

He stole Esau's birthright for a meal. Genesis 25, 29, it says, Jacob cooked a stew and Esau came in from the field and he was famished. And Esau said to Jacob, please let me have a swallow of that red stuff there for I'm famished. Therefore his name was called Edom. But Jacob said, first sell me your birthright. Esau said, behold, I'm about to die. So of what use then is the birthright to me? And Jacob said, first swear to me. So he swore to him and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank and rose and went on his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright. So which one's the good kid? No, he says no. Neither's the good kid. Well, which one would you be more proud of? So neither one of them are good kids, but which one would you prefer if you had to choose? I'd choose Jacob. Good shrewd businessman. Always looking for an opportunity. I'm just being honest with you guys about what I think.

Because you guys all have these thoughts too. You think Esau's impetuous. He's over the top. He's exaggerating. This is stupid. He's selling his birthright. And we have at the very end, you have it saying, thus Esau despised his birthright. And so he's careless and reckless. And you think, no, that's not good. So I liked Esau because he was a hunter, but I don't like the fact that he's impetuous. And so we're still adding to our opinions of these men. Jacob wouldn't feed his brother. Esau was willing to, you know, Sell his birthright for some soup. And then after that, as Isaac's nearing the end of his life, having stole Esau's birthright, Jacob goes in and he steals his brother's blessing. And what's the twist with that story? Well, he does it because his mom tells him to. Here, I'm going to dress you up like your brother. I'm going to put goat skin on your hands and your neck so that you feel like your brother. And here are his clothes, by the way. Wear those.

and go in there and represent yourself as your brother Esau. He just got sent away to make some food for his dad who has a taste for game. I'll prepare the food. You dress up like your brother and we're going to get you the blessing. And his mother says, you know, let all the consequences be on me if you get caught and if you get in trouble. And so what's Jacob do? Well, he does it. And he goes in and it's like, you can sort of like passively go along with a lie and try to maintain, What's the word? No. No. Culpability. Flausible deniability. That's what I'm looking for. Flausible. Well, she made me do it. It was my mother that made me do it. But Jacob can't. Why? Because his father says to him, Are you Esau? And he says, I am. Now, his father's blind. And he can't see. And so he's feeling him. It's the voice of Jacob, but it's the smell of Esau.

And so he's completed the whole thing. He's just a liar. Yeah, that's what it means. It means deceiver. That's what Jacob means. Not surprisingly, here he is. And so after that, Esau comes back and Esau wants the blessing because he knows that's why he got sent out. So he goes out and he kills the animal and he brings it in and he prepares it and he comes into his dad and his dad says, sorry, I've only, I already blessed your brother. Sorry. And Esau's livid. He's beside himself. And he plots in his heart to kill his brother. And so his parents send him away. So were Jacob, or I'm sorry, were Rebecca and Isaac, they should listen to our sermon series, huh? They should learn about godly parenting because here, look at what's going on in their house. Would you describe it as a godly home? Does your home resemble their home? Double. No. We don't want to talk about it.

And so why do I bring all of this up? Well, I bring all of it up because when we read, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated, we want to know why. What is it about these men that either qualified them for mercy or disqualified them? We really would like something to stand out, to distinguish one of them as being worthy. But there isn't anything between these two men. They both have their sins. They both have their... They're failures. And so think about it for a second. If you, knowing who they were, had to pick, which one would you pick to be the object of mercy? Daniel says, no, neither one of them are worthy. But you have to pick one. You pick Esau. You'd pick Esau? I'd pick Esau. You know why I'd pick Esau? Because he got messed over. His birthright was one thing. He was done with his birthright. But his blessing got straight up stolen from him.

And I think, you know, a nice twist at the end of the story would be good. But our text tells us, for though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything either good or bad, so nothing to make them worthy or unworthy, so that God's purposes according to his choice would stand, not because of works, but because of him who calls. We see that there's no, neither one of these men were qualified or worthy. So Daniel's right in saying neither one of them deserved it. Jacob was loved and Esau was hated so that God's mercy would be manifested, would be shown to us. And we have to swallow the pill of realizing we don't think people are worthy of God's mercy. We think of mercy in terms of, have you earned it? Are you worthy of it? And the reason this is important is because in our parenting of our children, we want to produce worthy children.

Don't you? You want to produce children who are worthy of the grace of God. I do. And so this text, it's very difficult because it says you can't make worthy children. And at that point, we want to sort of throw our hands up in the air and go, well, what's the point even of having children or worrying about how they raised if it's completely out of our hands anyhow? What's the point of giving our time and our energy and our love and our lives to this work? If we can't assure what will come of it all. And so we live in this sort of tension of wanting to raise godly children and yet not knowing how it's going to turn out. 100%. God isn't silent about how it will turn out. Our scripture lesson this morning said that the man who fears the Lord will be blessed and that his wife will be fruitful and that his children will be like olive plants.

And he'll be happy. And we have to be able to maintain in our minds the reality that God does work through parents in the care of their children. He does bless them as they obey him. He blesses the children as the parents obey him. And yet it's not a 100% guarantee. And we see this in Scripture. We also see this in our own lives. You see kids that have... Brothers and sisters that have grown up in the same home and they process their world very differently. And they make very different choices. And how can you explain it except to say that God's chosen one but not the other? I'm convinced that this instability of not knowing, is this child of mine a Jacob or an Esau, creates a lot of discouragement and a lot of difficulty in parenting.

Because if we want to raise children that are worthy or qualified to be Christians, to be objects of God's mercy, we pull onto ourselves the full weight of the salvation of our children's souls. And it's impossible to live under that pressure. You're not God, and you can't save your children's souls from hell. You can't guarantee that they're going to go to heaven, and the reason is because you're not God. But we feel this tension because we think as parents, well, I fail so much. Every time I fail, you think, what is the downstream outcome of what I did or what I didn't do? I should have done this. I wish I hadn't done that. What's that going to cost later? And then it happens again. And then it happens again. And then it happens again. And now it's breakfast time. Not much of the day has gone by. And there's this pressure.

that we live under. And it's enough to make you crack. It's enough to make you want to just pull out and go, I can't, I won't, I don't know what to do. Hands off, I trust God, but we don't really trust God. If we refuse our responsibilities to our children, we're not trusting God with their souls. You know, I've heard through the grapevine about this sermon series that some of you are discouraged. And I know that for one. Some of you have told me that you're discouraged. Most of you I hear about it through the network of relationships. And I want to say to you that I know that it's been difficult and it's been hard. And my goal is not to be hard on you. It's not to grind you into the ground. My goal, my hope, is to expose the difficulties that you know exist and to make room for you to begin to fight again.

against your sin and to not be discouraged and hopeless as a parent. Living in the culture that we live in and you think, what's this world going to be like for my kids? And is it even worth it? I want you to come away from this sermon series believing that it is worth it and that God is still the Lord of heaven and earth and that he's still the only sovereign in our nation that you're bringing kids up in. And in your home where you sin and you fail, I want you to come away saying, it's still worth it for me to fight against my sins as a parent and to strive to be faithful. And this text makes it very difficult because you go, well, what about, is it going to happen? What's it all going to produce? Well, what are you convinced it's going to produce? If you're discouraged, you're convinced that you're going to raise a bunch of Esau's. You wouldn't be discouraged if you were convinced you could raise a bunch of Jacob's.

Until you look at Jacob and then you go, well, actually, I don't want to raise Jacob. I wouldn't like Jacob living in my house. I don't think I'd like Rebecca living in my house, says Dan. And so it's discouraging because you go, I don't want my kids to be Esau's. Neither do I. Not for my kids, not for your kids. And so the reason I've pushed hard is because I want you to, I want to push past the feeling sorry for yourself and your failures. You do fail. You absolutely fail. You ought to look at Isaac and Rebecca and you ought to say, oh, God's merciful to parents that are failures. And I don't mean that in any way to be flippant or to be trite. If it was dependent on them, Isaac and Rebecca, they need to come in for counseling because they have marriage problems and they have parenting problems. And yet God was merciful to Jacob.

And you say, well, do you think that Isaac and Rebecca were comforted knowing that one of their sons was shown mercy and the other one wasn't? I won't be comforted and I won't be happy unless all my children are shown mercy. And it's too much to even think of, to bear. Especially as your children get older. I've got young children. But some of you have children that are grown, they're out of the house. You're not looking forward in hope, you're looking back. It's your report card. And you're going, I don't like what I see. And I don't like what's been produced. And I feel like I squandered the time that I had. And I really don't want my son to be an Esau. And I don't know what to do now. You wish you could get a do-over. I said to you a few, I don't know, a month ago or something, I was talking about the responsibilities of parents and grandparents to their grown children. To still be their parent. To be a parent of a grown child. You don't treat your 25-year-old,

like he's five. You treat him like he's 25, like he's married, he has his own house, whatever the situation is. You treat him according to his situation. But you are still his parent. You do still speak into his life. And what I want to encourage you to realize is that Satan would have you spending all of your time looking at your failures. All of your time. And there are plenty to look at, aren't there? If you don't know what they are, just ask your wife or your children. My son was in the house when we were changing the brakes, complaining about me to my wife. I don't know why he always sends me in here to find things. He doesn't even tell me where it's at. He thinks I know where everything's at. So don't any of you ever have that thought about? Don't you ever get exasperated? Someone tells you to do something? Here, make bricks with no straw. Go find my headlamp. Where is it? I don't know. Go find it. This is what happens in my house.

And so at breakfast this morning, we're talking about it, and I said to my son, I said, you know, I'm glad that you were honest about your frustration. I'd much rather have you get it out than to just have it live in you and get angry, because he was frustrated with me, right? So I'm glad you got it out. I said, but I'm not glad that you're missing the point. Here's the point. Here's the reason I said that to you. I didn't say it to you because I'm lazy or because I'm careless. I said it to you because... You're really, really attentive to where your stuff's at. And you're really, really attentive to when other people get into your stuff. And I want you to be attentive to others as well. You know where a lot of my tools are at because you use them, and I find them in the yard with lawnmower. And I want you to be attentive not only to yourself but to others. And so why am I telling you this story? Well, the question is, was it inappropriate for me to send him on seemingly a wild goose chase?

Is that good parenting? He didn't think so. My wife says, I did everything I could to not just say, well, don't be like that when you grow up then, honey. That's what Vanessa wants to say to him, but she didn't. Tells me later. So he's not the only one that's frustrated with the way dad does things. So is there any benefit in what I said to him? Daniel says yes. I say yes. I say yes to my wife and to my son, and neither one of them were inclined to believe me in the first pass. But after we talked through it, we've come to more of an agreement. So why am I talking about this? Well, I'm talking about it because I trust that raising a son who gets mercy has to do with me as his father. And we can't take a hands-off approach because we're scared of the outcome. What's the saying? Is it nothing ventured? Nothing, yeah.

What's the other side of it? Nothing ventured, nothing lost, right? Just like the slave in the parable of the talents. He said, here's your money, I got it all back to you. Nothing ventured, nothing lost. And he was called unfaithful. And so what I want is for you guys, we look at this thing, you look at Jacob and you look at Esau, and we're always trying to determine who are you and what are you and where are you going to end up? And what can I do to change it if I don't like what I think is happening? What we have to come to as parents is you have to come to faith and to trust in God. How do you process Jacob and Esau? You process Jacob and Esau by faith, trusting that God chooses some and doesn't choose others. And that in his wisdom and for his glory, he makes the decisions that he does. And also, it's...

One of the things that we do is we look at our young children. And you're trying to make these determinations. And you just can't. Because he who perseveres to the end, he will be saved. And so when you look at your children, what you want for them is you want them to live a life of faith. Their whole life. They're called to the same thing that you're called to. And there's no home base. that you can quick rush them over to when they're little and set them on it and act like they're going to be shielded from having to live by faith their whole life. Your children will have to live a life of faith, and Satan will attack them just like he's attacked you. And so if you want to demonstrate to them what it looks like, then you have to live a life of faith. You have to trust God with them, with their soul.

They have to know that you trust God. They have to know that you love God more than you love them. And that you wouldn't for a minute entertain the idea of cursing God if something bad happens to them. And you say, as soon as I say that, I think, you're such a monster. You're such a jerk. How could you say that? You're telling parents not to love their children, and that's not what I'm telling you. I'm not telling you not to love your children. I'm telling you that being a parent by faith is the hardest thing you'll do in your life. It's the absolute hardest thing you'll do in your life. And there's no point in your life where you go, okay, I'm done and everything's okay. That day doesn't come. Where you can look at your children and go, I don't have to be concerned about their soul anymore. They're safe. I don't need to worry. There are indications that your children are doing well, that they're growing, that they are living by faith.

But you know well enough in your own life that Satan's not going to stop attacking them, and you want them to persevere. And you can't lead them in that if all you're trying to figure out is, are you a Jacob or are you Esau? If I get you baptized, will that ensure that you're going to be Jacob? And I don't care if it's a baby or if it's your 12-year-old. Both Presbyterians and Baptists have this view of baptism, this idea that if we do this thing, now... Everything's, you know, we have our membership card now and God can't revoke it. I want you to realize that Satan would have you wasting your time trying to figure out whether your children are Christians or not already. And there is some wisdom in, you do as parents need to know where your children are at and where they're trending and what they struggle with. You have to know that. You're not being faithful if you don't know that.

But you ought also to realize that Satan's going to skew that information in your brain. He's going to take the weakness that you have towards your children, and he's going to manipulate it to cause you to fear, to paralyze you and your parenting. That's what he does. He's a liar and the father of lies. And so he'll say, you failed. And what you need to say is, you're right. Yep, I did. And I do. And I will. You're a fool if you can't say that. You have failed, you are failing, and you will fail. And you are not God. As demonstrated by the fact that you have failed, you are failing, and you will fail. God's not like that. And he's the one who saves souls. He's the one who has mercy and compassion in abundance to pour out on sinners.

And so the work of being a parent is not the work of saving your children's souls. The work of being a parent is to live and to teach and to demonstrate to them what it means to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. That's your job as a parent. And if you spend all of your time worrying about are you Jacob or are you Esau, what can I do to turn you, to change you, to keep you here? You had a good week. I'm glad for you to have a good week. Good weeks are great. We want good weeks to turn into good months, and then good months to turn into good years. But what do you do with a bad week? What happens if you have four good weeks and then you have a bad week? I don't sit and think, oh, well, we had four good weeks, so this is one bad week, and it'll probably turn around again. It's like, oh, no, the ship's sinking. And behind all that, you're doing the sort of things that disqualify you from mercy. You're not worthy. Christian parents have to trust God with their children.

And they have to have a principle in them that no matter what happens to their children or with their children, that they will love and serve God with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength. And I'll tell you, you won't do it perfectly. You hear me say that and you go, well, that's hopeless. I can't do that. I don't do that. And I'd say, you know, every parent is afraid that their children will die. It's unnatural that parents would bury their children. It's bad enough when children have to bury their parents. But it's unnatural for parents to bury their children. They're scared to death that their children will die. And the fear that goes along with that that I see in my own heart and I pray that I would have faith if something bad happens to one of my children that I would love God in the midst of it. And I don't have a whole bunch of confidence right now that I'd do well. If something bad happened to one of your kids, wouldn't it be a struggle and difficult? Some of you have gone through it. You've had hardships. You've lost children.

And it's constantly difficult. And I want to tell you, especially those of you that have gone through some of these hardships, you still have to trust God with your children. You can't clamp down. You can't become faithless. You have to walk by faith. Young children, older children, ones who are walking with the Lord, ones who aren't, ones you're not sure about, you have to trust God with them. If God has mercy on them, it's because he chose to have mercy on them. And he has mercy on sinners. You look at Jacob and Esau and you say, Jacob wasn't any more worthy, was he? He didn't deserve it. He was a lying cheat. He was very crafty. What did he do when he went with Laban? He got cheated. And we all go, that's not fair. Look what Laban did to him. He swapped out the daughters. Ha ha, work another seven years for the one you wanted. You know, Jacob, you think, good, Jacob got a little bit of his own medicine. That's what I think when I look at him. I go, how's the shoe fit on your foot, buddy? But I'm telling you, you have to trust God with your children.

whether God has mercy or doesn't have mercy, is not dependent entirely upon you. He will use you as parents. More than anyone else in the lives of your children, he'll use you. And it's an overwhelming burden. But your parenting doesn't make your children worthy or unworthy. Those aren't the terms. The Lord said to Moses, I'll have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I'll have compassion on whom I have compassion. So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs. It doesn't depend on you, parents. It depends on God who has mercy. And so what do you do? What do you do when you look at your children and you say, this particular child, he seems to have a hard heart. And I don't want to ignore it, and yet it's very scary to me, which is what parents who are paying attention to this stuff think. It's scary to me. He's not ready to die. I'm not ready for him to die.

What do you do? The simplest and most basic thing that you can do is you ought to be praying for your children that God would have mercy on them. That he would bless the efforts that you make. And here's the thing. Parents, I don't want you spending all of your time praying for your children saying, I know I'm a failure and I know I'm so bad and I know I screwed it all up. And listen, it's not about you. It's not about you. If you're praying for your children, pray for your children. If you have sin to confess, by all means, confess it. But do it all by faith. Pray by faith. You have young children. By young, you know, like 30 and younger. Young children. Pray that God will be merciful to them. Don't act like it's all over and done. When did Jacob become a Christian? It doesn't say. You can't tell me verse and number. We don't know when Jacob became a Christian exactly. I think he became a Christian when he was wrestling with God. When he was on the journey. Grown, right?

Grown. Here's the kind of wife we want you to get. I'm sick of the women of Canaan. Go get yourself a wife from my family. So he's grown. He's not a little kid. And his parents had to live in that tension. And you do your children a disservice if you try to tie up all of their loose ends when they're real young because they've got a whole long life to live. And you don't want to mislead them into thinking that because they did this thing or said that thing that their soul is all buttoned up and taken care of. They have to live by faith.

And so you pray for mercy for your children, and not just the ones that you think are doing poorly, but for the ones that are doing well. You pray that God would be merciful to them. I've told you a number of times that when Satan tempts you, he doesn't just try to make your life miserable. He tries to get you to quit. That's the goal. The goal is not to just like, oh, well, you can win. I'm just going to make it as miserable as you can as you're winning. No, no, no. His goal is... to destroy you, to get you to quit, to throw in the towel and say, I'm done. I'm done. And if you're honest, you think about it. You're tempted to say, I'm done. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to bear this anymore. I don't know what I want instead, but I know that this is miserable. And you have to realize that he will tempt your children in the same way, and you may not communicate to them a superficial faith that does not prepare them for that day.

And if all you're concerned about is, are you like Jacob or are you like Esau? You're going to end up doing your children a disservice because Satan's not going to play softball with them. And so you have to prepare them to fight. And so they need to see you fighting and they need to see you praying. And if God wasn't merciful, it would be hopeless, utterly hopeless. Who would have children? Who would take this work on? The only way you can do this work is by faith. I forget who said it. An old missionary, I don't remember who he says. Live your life in such a way that if God ever fails you, you fall flat on your face. When Vanessa and I talk about these things, I tell her similar things. I say, honey, listen, we've ordered our life in such a way that if we don't trust God, this whole thing will come apart. That's it. We have ordered our life in such a way that we must live by faith. And God has been good to us. And he's been faithful to us. Because he is faithful.

And he promises to be merciful to your children. And so believe him. Pray for your children. Don't concern yourself night and day constantly about whether they're saved or not. Because looks can be deceiving, especially when they're young. Love them. Care for them. Trust God that he'll be merciful with them and toward them for their whole life. And communicate that to them. Look to God for their salvation. Look to God for your comfort as a parent and your strength. You won't find it in your ability to do it right. You really, really won't. If that's the terms, then what you'll do is you'll change the standard. And you'll bring the bar down to, well, what I do is really close to what ought to be done. That won't do you any good. It's superficial healing. So if you want your children to be godly, you have to look to God for that. Parenting itself won't do it.

If you were in Sunday school, we weren't talking about parenting, but this is what we were talking about in terms of killing our sin. The only way that our sin can be killed is if the Holy Spirit works in us. No amount of external constraints or consequences or anything like that will actually kill sin. It might impair it a little bit for a time. But what I said in Sunday school was, here's the thing. You can do... do whatever you want. There'll be consequences for it, good or bad, right? But you are free to do whatever you want. And the same is going to be true for your children. They're going to be able to do whatever they want when they get older, when they're out of your home. And you don't need to live in fear of that day. You need to prepare them for that day. You fail as a parent, go to your kids, go to your wife, go to your husband, tell them.

You failed and that you trust God to forgive you for it. Don't make light of your sin, but you ought to trust God that he'll be merciful to you and that he'll be merciful to your children. And that you don't know the timing, you don't know the burdens or the temptations that you're going to face or that they're going to face. You really don't. You think that as life is right now is how it will always be, and that's not true. It won't always be this way. Maybe for the better or maybe for the worse. But the only thing that's constant and steady in our life is the faithfulness of God to us. He sent his son into this world to live and to die on our behalf. As unworthy sinners who were dead in our sins, who were the enemies of God, he sent his son to save us. And as his son was on the cross, he said what we would never have said. Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. God is merciful. He has mercy on whom he chooses to have mercy. And he doesn't have mercy on everyone.

But it ought not to be an assault to your peace. He's not merciful to everyone. You ought to trust God with your children and with their souls and with their care and where they will end up. And then you ought to be faithful. Trusting God with their souls is something we do in our minds. The outworking of that is your parenting. If you trust God with your children, You'll be a good parent. You'll be a faithful parent. You'll be a parent that repents when you fail. If you don't trust God with your children, it will affect your parenting. You'll be afraid to do anything. You'll be afraid to discipline. You'll be afraid to love them and give them your heart. Because what if it doesn't go well? What if they reject you for a time? And so throughout this sermon series, I haven't said, well, this is how you do this, and this is how you do that, and this is how you do the other, and this is...

I can't give you a formula. Last week I said, well, it's like this and this and this, but then as soon as I say that, I have to, you know, what I give with one hand, I have to take away with the other hand and say, well, this can be like this, or it can be completely different and be like this. God is trustworthy. He is faithful. He's faithful to give you children. He's faithful to withhold them from you. He's faithful to give them health and to give them sickness. He's faithful to work in them through you. As their parent. And I want you to trust God with your children. And it's ground zero of what's difficult. You can't be disinterested and you can't coddle them. Neither one of those things guarantees their salvation. You have to love God and love them. Teach them all the time. Discipline them when they need it. Do it by faith. Do it when they're young. Do it when they're older. Talk to them about their soul.

Talk to them about what you want for them. Talk to them about what you expect from them. Forgive them when they sin. Confess your sins when you sin against them. And trust God that he'll be merciful. Father in heaven, it's you that has made us and not we ourselves. And we're humbled by your patience in dealing with us and bearing with us. We thank you that you are merciful to sinners. From the bottom of our hearts, we're thankful. Realizing that we don't deserve any of your kindnesses. nor do our children. And yet, having given them to us, Father, to raise, we ask that you would bless our efforts and that you would save their souls. We pray for faith as mothers and fathers that we would not believe Satan's lies, but that we would believe your word. And we pray, Father, that you would help us to set a godly example of Christian faith and love for your son, Jesus.

Help us to set a good example to our children. And we pray, Father, that they would follow in our train and that they would hate their sin and that they would love their Savior and that they would serve him all the days of their life. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.